TY - JOUR
T1 - Infant homicide at the hands of mothers
T2 - Toward a sociological perspective
AU - Smithey, Martha
N1 - Funding Information:
Received 11 March 1996; accepted 15 January 1997. This research was supported by Grant 5-F31-DA05463 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. I am grateful to Howard B. Kaplan, Ben Crouch, Jane Sell, Alex Mclntosh, and S. Fernando Rodriguez, as well as three amonymous reviewers, who offered helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. I would also like to thank C. Eddie Palmer for his guidance through the revisions of this article. Address correspondence to Martha Smithey, Department of Sociology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968.
PY - 1997
Y1 - 1997
N2 - Infant homicide has been examined, explained, justified, and treated according to psychiatric‐psychological perspectives. There has been little examination of the social correlates directly pertaining to infant homicide. This article examines infant homicide from the perspective of 15 mothers who have been deemed legally responsible for the deaths of their infants. The qualitative data collected were derived by intensive interviewing. The findings of these data are given within a conceptual framework of social learning, economic deprivation, self‐attitude, and substance abuse theories. The objective of this research was to identify relevant common factors that are potential social correlates of infant homicide and to incorporate them into a multidimensional, theoretical model. It is suggested that when infant homicide occurred at the hands of the mothers interviewed, it was the result of a culmination of predisposal factors evolving from the mothers’ socialization experience and precipitating factors stemming from economic deprivation and a lack of interpersonal support.
AB - Infant homicide has been examined, explained, justified, and treated according to psychiatric‐psychological perspectives. There has been little examination of the social correlates directly pertaining to infant homicide. This article examines infant homicide from the perspective of 15 mothers who have been deemed legally responsible for the deaths of their infants. The qualitative data collected were derived by intensive interviewing. The findings of these data are given within a conceptual framework of social learning, economic deprivation, self‐attitude, and substance abuse theories. The objective of this research was to identify relevant common factors that are potential social correlates of infant homicide and to incorporate them into a multidimensional, theoretical model. It is suggested that when infant homicide occurred at the hands of the mothers interviewed, it was the result of a culmination of predisposal factors evolving from the mothers’ socialization experience and precipitating factors stemming from economic deprivation and a lack of interpersonal support.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0031173074&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/01639625.1997.9968058
DO - 10.1080/01639625.1997.9968058
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0031173074
VL - 18
SP - 255
EP - 272
JO - Deviant Behavior
JF - Deviant Behavior
SN - 0163-9625
IS - 3
ER -